“Copy Moon joy” #Artemis

That's fiction for you

oh my god, those naïve idiots saw him on TV pretending to be competent as part of a TV show, so they thought he was ACTUALLY competent, so they PUT THE DAFT OAF IN CHARGE? And of course he was completely out of his depth?

wow I do love Galaxy Quest (1999)

yeah that's just Hislopslop

An illustration from 'National-Kinderlieder für die Zürchersche Jugend' (1789) showing the earliest known depiction of the Easter Hare, along with a basket of Easter eggs, and a mother and children hunting for the Easter eggs in a garden

From 1789: this is the earliest known visual depiction of the Easter Hare, who would ultimately become the Easter Bunny

Please note that he is bringing the eggs in a basket, thus settling the question of whether the bunny lays the eggs or not

The joy, the JOY of finding that the Chortlemuffin Effect has been transposed to bsky

Ulysses 31 Redux YouTube video by dermotcanterbury

This will always be my favourite reconstruction of Ulysses 31. We just don't see this kind of dedication any more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMpf...

A HD remaster of Ulysses 31 (1982) is coming today on a French network!! 🤩

"A sneak peek at the HD restoration of the #Ulysses31 series. This new scan fully reveals the richness of TMS's work, including the character designs by Shingo Araki and Michi Himeno. I never imagined I'd be able to rediscover this cult classic in such high quality. Thank you! 🤩"

Oh my.

In any event, the motive we impute to Bede for speculating is secondary to the fact that he *did* speculate, and admits to having done so.

This may be why he mistranslates 'mud-month' as 'month of cakes'. It gives him an opening to mention a pagan practice of offering cakes to the Gods. He also mentions sacrifices to Hretha in the following month, a goddess who - like Eostre - is not attested outside of Bede.

That is the core rhetorical device he's working with here. These were the old sacrifices, this is the new sacrifice. The more he can show the new sacrifice - those of praise - replacing old ones, the better his argument works.

He concludes this section of De Temporum Ratione with the words 'Good Jesu, thanks be to thee, who hast turned us away from these vanities and given us to offer to thee the sacrifice of praise.'

Bede had an agenda. He wanted to depict his people as having been mired in idolatry before Gregory and Augustine brought Christianity to them. He was also deeply critical of the native British 'Celtic' church for not having attempted to convert the Germanic pagan invaders.

So we can safely say that Bede was a) not working from first-hand information, and b) engaging in speculation concerning the meaning of the old pagan English terms.

The next question is why he would have wanted to infer pagan rituals and deities in the first place when he was a Christian.

The word 'sol', meaning mud, is the antecedent of our own word 'soil'.

But Bede translates Solmonath as 'month of cakes, which they offered to their gods in that month'. Again, this is clear evidence of a lack of first-hand information, and another assumption of pagan rites.

'We suspect' confirms he was not working from first-hand information, and therefore had to infer a potential meaning. We also see the kind of meaning he chose to infer: he suspected 'mother's night' meant pagan rites.

Bede also makes mistakes. 'Solmonath', equivalent to February, means mud-month.

We know this because of what he says about Modranecht:

'That very night, which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is, “mother’s night”, because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night.'

Please note the 'we suspect'.

Firstly, the usual assumption is that Bede was able to just pop outside and ask a former pagan what used to go on in England. In other words, people assume Bede's information was gathered first-hand.

It wasn't. His information was almost certainly textual. He had to speculate about meanings.

So the current year's crop of Eostre discourse contains a lot of protestation along the lines of:

'but why would Bede, a Christian monk, invent a pagan goddess?'

and

'but why would Bede, a revered historian, lie?'

& it's past time to point out what the problems with Bede's account actually are:

well, we do know the Pagan English did offer cakes to their gods, because the practice is preserved in the (Christianized, but barely) field-blessing ritual, the Aecerbot.

Professor Philip Shaw's explanation is that Kentish missionaries carried the now fully Christianized term 'Easter' to Germany, explaining Ostarmonath.

It's entirely possible he was recording a genuine tradition. However, that section does contain Bede's own admitted speculations, and (paradoxically) it would actually have suited his agenda to have inferred a goddess where none existed.

Unfortunately it's clear Bede did not have first hand information. He says of Modranecht, 'mothers' night', that it was so called 'because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they conducted all that night'. He's forced to speculate. He also mistranslates Solmonath, 'mud-month', as 'month of cakes'.

According to Bede, yes, that's the source of the English name.

The Goddess name 'Ostara' was proposed by Jakob Grimm in the 1800s as a Germanic equivalent of the English Eostre mentioned by Bede. It's not historically attested. Aidan Kelly applied the Ostara name to the neopagan Spring Equinox festival in the 1970s.

Welcome back, #headlinesthatsoundlikecrypticcrosswordclues

The pagan Spring Equinox festival of Ostara is not the antecedent of the Christian Easter, because the pagan Spring Equinox festival of Ostara was created in around 1973.

I appreciate that a statement like this warrants some substantiation, so bear with me.

amazing

moby-dick, his eyes enormous: from hell's heart you STAB at moby? for hate's sake you spit your last BREATH at moby? oh! oh! the great shroud of the sea for ahab! the great shroud of the sea rolling on as it rolled five thousand years ago!!!!